Sharing my experiences while teaching at the Christian Academy in Japan.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Middle School Brain Bowl!

Last week I went with nine Middle School students from Christian Academy in Japan, to the Kanto Plains Middle School Brain Bowl. Brain Bowl is kind of like the Reach for the Top TV show, or It's Academic TV show, except it's at a Middle School level, and the teams are made up of students from different schools.

I apologize for the blurriness of the picture.

There are three different rounds. The first round consists of ten to twelve questions. The questions can be a variety of topics, ranging from math questions to questions about novels, to science questions to geography questions. The groups have an answer sheet and write the answers down to the questions as they are read. There is about 30 seconds between questions and about a minute after the last question is read. The papers are collected after each set and graded, points awarded for correct answers to the teams.

The second round is what we call the buzzer round. Two teams compete against each other on the stage. They have about ten questions and the first student to buzz in and answer the question correctly will receive points for the team. There were twenty-four teams, so we had twelve sessions in the buzzer round. The questions were from a variety of topics.

The third round consisted of what I call, theme questions. One of the sets of questions were visuals of famous landmarks from around the world. Each group had to identify the landmark, the city and the country that the landmark is located. Another set of questions were sound bites of anthems from various countries and they had to identify which country's anthem was played. Another set of questions were country outlines that were skewed and the students had to identify the countries. Another set were pictures of rare animals and they had to identify the animal. Some of the questions were difficult to answer and I know I wouldn't be able to answer them all.

The students had fun making new friends and working together with other students. I am sure they were able to learn a lot.

CAJ team

The CAJ team funny looking picture

We were at AOBA - Japan International School in Hikarigaoka. This year the event fell on a Japanese holiday and their students were not at school that day, so it did not inconvenience the running of their school that day. We are in the gym for the competition and for lunch the students were outside. It was a nice day, so they were able to be out on the play structure or sitting at tables to playing on the grass fields.

Image used for the Brain Bowl event.

If you are interested, you can go to this link that has study stack questions to a variety of topics.